Listening Archives
The Lightbulb Moment: Touch Of Gray
Cauliflower, that kind-of-like-broccoli-but-perhaps-less-exciting vegetable, was completely absent from my childhood. I honestly didn’t know what it was, other than something my mother breezed over in the produce section of the super market. She was not a fan of the baby-tree-like vegetables and therefore, it was often excluded from the communal veggie tray at parties and officially barred from our refrigerator....
The Lightbulb Moment: Compare And Contrast
It is a lifelong goal of mine to understand the subtleties of music — the sound of records coming from particular eras and locals, the specific timbre of different instruments, and the nuances that reflect the personality of every player. There’s no better way to hone in these subtleties than by comparing and contrasting songs and catalogs that are of...
Ask Damian: More Album Recommendations
Q: I really dug the last column about albums to check out, if you want to get into jazz. I found a ton of great stuff that I actually liked in there! Do you have any more suggestions that extend beyond the jazz genre? A: Thanks! I’m glad that you discovered some new music. That’s great to hear. I’ve gotten...
Album Suggestions for Getting Into Jazz
Q: Do you have any suggestions for what albums I might check out if I wanted to get into jazz? I’ve, of course, heard bits and pieces of things before flipping through radio stations, in restaurants, etc., but nothing ever really grabbed me. What should I check out that might ignite the interest? A: Alright, the pressure’s on. This will...
The Lightbulb Moment: Check This Out
It’s the year 2015. Hours are spent each day scrolling though videos on Facebook, clicking links to YouTube, or listening to preset Pandora, Spotify, and Amazon stations. We experience music on television commercials or reality TV shows, with hashtags and at symbols telling us where to go if we happen to like the song that is fed to us. It...
Improving Your Musical Ears
Being a musician requires a great number of skills. However, the aural component is by far the most prevalent. So, to perform at the highest levels, we must have good listening skills. Ultimately we need to hear, and understand, exactly what is happening around us. Only when we can do this can we respond in our most communicative and artistic...
Types of Listening: Three Approaches for Bass Players
Q: How do you hear music, as in a critical method of hearing? How can your playing or musicality get better just by hearing a certain genre or style? Do you perhaps hear a piano comping and try to do the same if you are digging it? A: The answer to this question could fill a book, for sure. It...
A Different Way To Listen: Thoughts on Transcribing Bass Lines
Think about all of the ways we can hear music… we can listen to it in our car, hear it as we walk through a super market, be encompassed by it in a movie theater, experience a private listening session on our headphones, or hook a record player up to a great set of speakers. Clearly, there are many mediums...
Breaking Down Music: Start with the Songs You Love
When it comes to music, we all have our favorite bands, our favorite songs, favorite singers, bass players and maybe even some guitar solos. Some of us develop a preference for certain genres; they shape our music library, our concert expenditures and our playing repertoire. It’s easy to know that we like something, mainly because we find ourselves singing along...